After walking through a portal in Tate Liverpool’s first-floor galleries, visitors encounter classical sculptures alongside newly commissioned artworks. The artists have imagined a world where artists from Ancient Greece and contemporary times have collaborated, merging the past, present and future into a single fiction just as the city's architects did when they designed Liverpool's neoclassical buildings in the 1800s.

The Ince Blundell objects, borrowed from National Museums Liverpool’s antiquities collections for this episode, include a series of classical sculptures, vases, busts and reliefs bought by art collector Henry Blundell in the early 1800s. Many of the sculptures were subject to inaccurate restoration: female heads appear fixed to male bodies, a toe is stuck to the wrong foot, and classical fragments are combined with additions made by eighteenth-century restorers to make new figures, an accepted practice at that time.

Alongside Blundell’s figures and fragments,
Koenraad Dedobbeleer has made a series of display structures to support the classical sculptures in their new context. Andreas Angelidakis’s new film looks at Ancient Greek vases, and how they were used to spread news and myth, comparing this dissemination to the internet. Jumana Manna’s work draws parallels between Athens and Jerusalem to relate how their stories both contributed to the West's self-construction, which in turn mirrored and partially shaped the economy and politics of the Middle East. Betty Woodman’s mural depicts a domestic scene, complete with three-dimensional ceramic objects.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Double Take: Office/Leader of the Chasseurs/Syrian Revolution Commanding a Charge uses an 1812 painting by Théodore Géricault as an example of the way people build complex and contradictory relationships with their colonial past. Also featured is new and previously existing work by other artists including Jason Dodge, Samson Kambalu and Sahej Rahal.

Tate Liverpool is the home of the national collection of modern and contemporary art in the North of England.